How is it that people still don’t get this? If you are a white American living in a fairly homogeneously white community it is shamefully easy for you to remain clueless that there are two very different Americas: one for white Americans and one for black Americans. This has been true from the time black people were first forcibly brought to this country in chains, and it sadly remains largely true still. Our failure to come to terms with this truth and with racism generally, is one of our greatest failings as a nation.
Please check out this article in Upworthy by Jon Comulada about a statement made by Malcolm X in 1964 regarding the attitude of police in black communities, notable Harlem. At the time of this interview, Harlem was, and remains, a community of black American families across a wide spectrum of socio-economic class. It is sadly still relevant to black communities, which are American communities, across the country.
My dad had a love affair with the Native American people. Not that he ever involved himself in native communities or causes, tried to learn more about their culture by direct, intensive study, or even decried the decimation of that people and culture by the white European American settlers and pioneers. He loved them because they were part of a tremendous, dashing and rousing adventure tale; and, being a romantic, my father loved all adventure tales. He especially loved those adventures that played out in real life, and so he devoured factual history and fictionalized history about such dramatic events as the American Revolution, the expansion of the white settlers west, the Civil War, and of course the two World Wars. He wasn’t limited to American adventures, though they were his favorite kind. He also read about Napoleon and Ghengis Khan, Marco Polo and Erik the Red. In the context of the clash between Native American culture and the white Europeans, who would be the inevitable victors due to their advancement in science and engineering, he offered no platitudes, no assessments of blame, no regrets, only his deep admiration and nostalgia for the warriors and chieftains who, despite being wholly out of their depth in the contest, were indeed noble savages.
I knew all this because my father was the person I observed most, absorbed most, feared most, wanted attention from most, and, in later years, discussed most in therapy. He would talk about Native Americans with respect and awe. He admired how they put everything on the line for the safety of their villages, how they acted in the name of honor, and were doomed precisely because they were not a devious people. When my sisters and I were very young, he’d put on a native headdress he had purchased while on a trip out to the Southwest with his buddy George in the years following WWII. He’d put the feathers on and hop and grunt the way he thought a brave or a chief might, and we girls would all squeal in delight, but also become just a little afraid of this transformation of our father into a wild man, in touch with the spirit world. He was part of the wild rumpus, and I could see the joy and serious concentration in his face. I could also see the pleasure my mother took in seeing her three girls so entertained and excited, but which I may at the time have mistaken for an endorsement of the authenticity of the proceedings taking place in our living room in the Bronx, far away in space and time from any actual native ceremonies.
When I was about 14, far from those days of the wild rumpus, my father came into my room, held out a keychain charm in his palm and said, “This is the second keychain this magazine outfit has sent me, and since I already have one, I thought you might want it.”
I couldn’t believe it! My father was offering a bit of the noble adventure to me, and I was not going to let him down! I looked at this keychain, a figure of an eagle with spread wings atop other native symbols and totems, and while part of me thought,“Er, what the hell am I going to do with this?” the greater part of me understood, or rather hoped, that this meant he KNEW I could appreciate how special this native American keepsake, which had been manufactured in some factory in Oklahoma or maybe even China, really was. “Oh wow, Dad,” I said. “Thanks.” And I reverently took the keychain and put it on my desk. I had been anointed! I had been chosen! It mattered not that my eldest sister was out of the house in her first year of marriage, or that my next older sister was too caught up in her senior year of high school to be spending much time around the house when my father received this duplicate keychain, leaving me as the only viable recipient. In my young mind, he had chosen me as the one who would understand. And, not knowing, or ever knowing, what to do with it, I left it on my desk as proof that I could be trusted to carry the torch of idealism, romanticism and appreciation for the suffering and ultimate demise of that noble race.
About two years later, my father was in my room for one reason or another when he saw the keychain on my desk. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, and I thought what was coming next was a glowing acknowledgment of my ability to understand why the keychain was so important. But what came next instead was “Why did you take this out of my drawer?” When I explained, “No, Dad, you gave it to me, don’t you remember?” he came back with, “If you wanted to see it, you could have asked me. Why would you go into my drawer and take something that wasn’t yours?” I was hit by two utterly unrelated thoughts simultaneously, neither of which I could articulate very well, for my ability to communicate has always been compromised by the rush of emotions. One, my Dad apparently had no memory of having given me the keychain, of that moment in time when I thought we were bonding as elder and protégé, and two, he actually thought I would pry into his private space and go through his drawers. I didn’t know where to turn first, but my dad did the navigating for me. “How could you go into my drawer like that??” he demanded.
I protested fervently. I said, “Dad, I wouldn’t go into your drawer. You gave it to me, don’t you remember?” You gave it to me!”
“No, I wouldn’t have given it to you,” he said, apparently having lost all memory of the arrival of a duplicate that would enable him to do just that. “And I could understand if you wanted to see it, but you should have come to me and not just taken it from my drawer.” A few more protests back and forth, and I had become a crying sack on my bed. There were very unsettling things going on. My father had no functioning memory! Either that, or he did not attach the least little bit of significance to the moment, making it easily forgotten. He thought I was capable of sneaky, petty thievery! I wasn’t quite sure which upset me more, but I suppose the indictment of my character won out.
As I lay there, a shuddering and weeping heap, he stormed off to his room with the keychain he had snatched from my desk, intending to put it in its rightful place. When he opened his drawer, I heard from the other room a faint, “Oh.” He saw his original lying there, unmoved.
And what happened next was also very upsetting, although not unexpected. My father came to my door and gruffly, with just the barest bit of sheepishness, said, “I’m sorry. Do you hear me, I’m sorry, ok?” There would be no hugs, no scooping, no lamentations of remorse for having hurt me so. I lay on my bed gutted and bereft until after about 20 minutes, when I picked myself up and continued my life. Despite my anger and hurt, I did not return the keychain. I did not chuck it in the garbage. I suppose I hoped it would be cleansed with time and become once again a symbol of my father’s faith in me.
Another two years later, I was visiting from college, and my father, having come into my room to tell me one thing or another spied the keychain. I kid you not, this is what happened: he said, “Wait a minute… this is mine. Why did you take it?” And the whole thing played out again in miserable inevitability. As a young adult, with greater understanding of the world generally and of my father more specifically, this time I took it in with as much horror as sorrow. My father did not remember having hurt me so, just two years ago. He did not remember discovering the original keychain safely in his drawer. He did not remember me laying on my bed, a quivering, sobbing girl. And, bonus, he still thought me capable of going into his drawers and taking something without asking. This time, my concern for his swiss cheese memory, and what it might mean about his health or ability to learn, won out, just barely, over my hurt feelings. There was no sobbing. Instead, I found my voice and said, “Dad, oh my god, don’t you remember we had this whole conversation before? Don’t you remember how you accused me of taking your keychain and upset me and then you found yours in your drawer and apologized?” And in the face of his continued repetition about how wrong it was for me to go into his drawer, I held fast and spoke like a college freshman. “Dad, you’re upsetting me, wrongfully accusing me, and I advise you to stop because otherwise you’re going to feel bad and foolish in a few minutes!” Despite the surety and relative calm in my voice there was no listening, no consideration of this alternative possibility, no heeding of my warning. My mother had caught on to what was happening this time, and called up the stairs, “Stanley! Listen to what your daughter is saying!”
But he was not taking in the information. He almost never took in the information.
It was why he couldn’t know that I was not the sort to go snooping in his drawer or take his treasures. It was why he couldn’t know I had so achingly believed his gift was a special moment of initiation into the armchair adventure club. It was why he could not accept more than two seconds of a hug or engage in dialogue. It was why, when he eventually made his way once again to his drawer and found the keychain occupying its usual spot, he again did not express profound regret for having maligned me or having ignored my protestations.
I understood like I had never understood before. My father was passionate, vibrant, a storyteller, a dreamer, heroic in his own unflagging commitment to move forward, to provide for his family in a dangerous job that wore him down little by little… and I adored him. But I’d never get in. I’d never have the relationship with him that I truly wanted.
Twenty-four years later, on the day of the evening my father died, he lay still and silent on his bed, with closed eyes. I sat next to him. I caressed his face, able to do so for the first and last time in my life, and told him how much I loved him. Without knowing whether he could even hear me, I told him how I reenacted all his horseplay and recitations I so loved as a child with my own children, and would again with my grandchildren. I told him how he lived in me, in all of us. How I could always feel his love through the things he did for us, his constancy, and the way he beamed with pleasure and contentment for his family. How much he had always meant to me. I clasped his hand and kissed his forehead. Did I get in at that final moment? I will never know for sure, but it was my most undefended and truest offering nevertheless, for the man who had the biggest impact on my life, for good and bad, who offered me so much, and who I miss every single day.
The four million plus views this video has had is proof that a playful, open heart and the ability to experience joy are just as vital for the betterment of humankind, and require just as much genius, albeit of a different kind, as the talents of intellects, philosophers, mathematicians, artists and scientists.
I recently realized that my lifetime struggles with singing mirror exactly my lifetime struggles with self-acceptance and self-expression. What a cliché.
saved from my-diy-crafts-tuts/.blogspot.com
From the age of 5 or 6, singing was a source of joy, of wings for me. Apparently, my rendition at the age of 6 of My Favorite Things, from The Sound of Music was notable enough that my camp counselor pulled over some of her counselor friends for a repeat performance. But just as I was always scanning my family, friends and peers for cues that I wasn’t quite up to par, I was also always very sensitive to any negative criticism about my singing, and it always trumped whatever genuine smiles I also sometimes elicited. At my Bat Mitzvah, one of my 13 year old guests told me after the ceremony that the Kiddush was not meant to be sung with vibrato. Not ever having had a voice lesson, (or even really understanding what vibrato was) whatever vibrato I had was naturally present, but apparently that was a bad thing. It didn’t help that during my high school years the choral director was an ornery old man with a bad temper and no business working with students. He called me out once in front of the entire choir for singing nasally. He had me sing the phrase “Christe eleison” over and over, slamming his baton each time while he mocked me with an excessively nasal rendition, but never bothering to explain to me how to open the sound. Mercifully, after the third time, I magically, and without any understanding of what I was doing differently, landed on an a clear resonant sound, and he actually raised his arms and proclaimed “Hallelujah!” I understood, of course, that everyone’s mortification was not due to my nasal singing, but due to the dreadful awareness that this could have just as easily been them being humiliated. But I also understood that there was something pathetic, inferior, about my singing. I doubted it constantly.
The problem was, of course, I cared too much. Singing made me soar. It gave me a means to express my heart, my understanding of pain, love, sauciness, peace, and confusion. And somehow, it also became an offering of myself, so that any shortcomings or rejections were a dagger into my own breast.
borzui.tumblr.com Alireza Borzui
I sought voice lessons with extremely unqualified people, who taught me no technique whatsoever, and was consistently placed in the second soprano or even alto sections of choirs, due to the vocal strain I’d exhibit whenever I tried to go into the soprano range. The problem with this was that I had no strength in the alto range either, and so, with a weak sound, limited range and no understanding of my abilities, I lamely persisted, trying to achieve flight, still sensing just out of reach a joy like no other, and yet also feeling clipped, inadequate, and confused as well. In other words, singing became a very emotionally fraught activity for me. A minefield. I was as sensitive and wounded as I was determined.
For a few years, I seemed to find my place. I sang with an a cappella group in college, doing standards with complex harmonies. My group, The Chattertocks, had an old-fashioned sound, and provided a home for my particular kind of singing, gentle and sweet. As my confidence grew, a few friends of mine noticed and actually told me that I had a beautiful voice, making me happier than they could ever imagine. But once I graduated from college and went into the larger world, my singing tapered off dramatically. I had none of the training or technique for classical singing, the only kind I found available for amateurs, and a short stint with a chamber choir was nothing but a continual fight for my life. In one strange moment, the conductor pointed out to the entire group how I was the only one on my part who consistently came in at the proper time, and how this should shame them all since I the weakest at sight reading and had the least musicianship of the bunch. Yikes.
Then two developments occurred that contributed to my shutting down. One was that my new husband didn’t seem to enjoy my singing very much. He told me fairly early on in our relationship that when I dreamily sang standards to myself in the car in his presence it was a presumptuous imposition and he’d prefer it if I stopped. The other was that my daughter began singing at the age of 4 and had the voice of an angel. Many years later she told me that it was my singing to her at night that instilled a love of singing in her own heart, but all I could see was that she was a young and vulnerable little girl whose only area of unquestionable confidence was her lovely voice. My focus shifted almost completely to celebration of her unfettered expression. As she grew and faced the painful challenges from being a wonderfully peculiar outlier on the bell curve of uniformity, her singing was something that called to everyone, awkward outliers and popular middlings alike. Even the most scornful peers and parents were moved and had to grant her this acknowledgment – she had a beautiful instrument and naturally knew how to play it like a master. I was so happy for her; she got everything I ever wanted for myself–people to feel something when she sang – and it made her happy as well. I encouraged immediately her interest in private voice lessons, and to this day cannot recall whether that interest generated from a seed planted by her middle school chorus teacher, came to my daughter on its own out of her love of singing, or was all but assured by my constant praise of her voice, and the beaming smile on my face only and barely kept in check by my desire to ensure that my dear girl wouldn’t forget how to remain humble. I never risked diminishing her by conveying that I thought my voice came anywhere near hers, and indeed I never believed that it did. And I daresay, she grew to become as confident in her sound as she was in her face, the other possession of hers that stopped people in their tracks. Which is to say, she became vain. And I was helpless to curb it because I knew she was right. Her own high opinion of her voice was the truth. She was that good. But her vanity and her impatience with lesser practitioners led her to criticize my occasional forays into song and to point out where she could do a better job. It was a one-two punch: Keep your own bird’s song quiet so as not to detract from your child’s, and then hear her chide you for your failings in voice. The vulnerability and honesty in my voice – the expression woven into the notes of my love for her, or whatever particular emotion I dared offer- did not seem to affect her. She heard only the uneven support, the slight wobbling, the occasional sharp or the collapse of the palette.
So, with my less than enthusiastic husband and virtuoso daughter, I stayed more or less silent for over 20 years.
found at http://goingoutsidethebox.tumblr.com/post/14320430113/shyness Endless Downstairs
Then about 5 years ago things began to change. One night at synagogue services I was approached by the conductor of the choir and the lead cantorial soloist. To my secret delight, the conductor told me that the soloist had heard my voice, having been standing close to where I sat, and had gone to directly to her afterward to tell her that the choir should recruit me. I was all at once happy beyond reasoning and also humbled, for the soloist who pronounced this had a beautiful voice indeed. The next thing I knew, with my children grown enough for me to make the time for rehearsals and services, I was in the choir. That led me to me sitting at one of the choir services near a woman I knew loosely from various activities at the synagogue. When we talked about what led each of us to the choir this woman mentioned she was getting voice lessons from someone she recommended highly, and she encouraged me to think about getting lessons as well, if I were seriously interested in reviving my singing. And so I called the voice teacher and began private lessons. These things don’t happen by accident. I must have really wanted to sing.
Over 5 years later, I am still studying with the same teacher. This wonderful woman, a professional singer and cantor, trained at the best music schools in the country, immediately understood things about my voice that no one else seemed to: I didn’t know how to use it and I was blocked. She helped me unlock an entire additional octave in the soprano range, where I actually belonged, simply by patiently and kindly showing me how to let go of my tightened tensed throat and jaw and my deep-rooted fear. At first, at recitals, I was so afraid to sing in front of others that my heart palpitated and I grew white as a sheet. But I persevered. I persevered without little more than an extracted and somewhat strained compliment from my husband or a careful remark from my daughter, encouraging but with the spectre of all the things she wasn’t saying (and let me know without words that she wasn’t). I stopped asking them to attend my recitals and chose to believe my teacher’s insistence that I had a gift to give others. I just needed to accept it for what it was and use it how it was meant to be used, instead of trying to emulate or compare myself to other singers and believing always that I fell short. My dear sisters would occasionally come to hear me sing, smiling and silent but always nodding, fully present and encouraging for the earnest and clearly important struggle, even while they perhaps wished I wasn’t quite so invested and therefore so easily crushed, and even though they might have been hard-pressed, if someone asked them, why it was so painfully important to me. And over the years, little by little I could sing with less and less of the constriction I had always brought. I began asking for, and receiving parts in choir songs. I was asked to sing at my friend’s occasional religious celebrations in her home for the Jewish holidays of Sukkot, Chanukah and Shavuot, and listeners would approach me afterward to tell my how lovely my singing was. The conductor of the synagogue choir invited me to join an elite women’s choir she directed, and the next thing I knew, I was challenging myself and enjoying the stretch for works by Handel, Thompson, and Rachmaninoff. And slowly, ever so slowly, I grew to appreciate that I did have something others enjoyed. A sweetness, an old-fashioned yearning that carried my heart across, and they began telling me that I moved them. They did not focus on the technical failures, the occasional dropped support or forward sounding note. They focused on what I could do for them, and, sure enough, that’s what I began to focus on as well.
The final breakthrough came to me about a year ago. It dawned on me that when I let go completely of the fear, I indeed connected – both with my voice and with the audience. When it became about them instead of about me, I was freed. I was able to stop worrying about all that I couldn’t do, all that my mistakes revealed about my inadequacies, and just feel that sense of joy that comes from laying it all out there and, becoming a vessel for the listeners to willingly sip from. I could see them clutch at their hearts or mist up. And the more I saw their honest and receiving reactions, the more comfortable I was revealing my voice. The emotion, the vulnerability, the aching. It wasn’t a frightened plea for acceptance anymore; it was a brave gift. People enjoy singers and songs because they express baldly and without abashment all the emotions we feel constrained from expressing ourselves. When listening to a singer communicate a broken heart, or confusion, or flirtation, or over the moon love, people lose themselves and allow themselves to feel what they otherwise might disguise during actual communication. Once I understood that, once I understood that most people are just as constricted and afraid as I had always been, I could feel more at ease revealing not just my voice but who I am.
borzui.tumblr.com Alireza Borzui
For this opening up of my voice paralleled in time my slow but insistent opening up (or perhaps reopening) of my nature. And the more I relaxed and revealed without embarrassment that true nature –my giggling, my honest appraisals of what was being said or what I was observing, my desire for friendship or my off-beat sensibilities – the more it seemed that people reacted favorably. More favorably, it turns out, than they did when I tried to blend, tried to remain unseen, smooth and flawless. I discovered that far from being alone in my pained self-thwarting, I was in a sea of people who stay muted because they, too, are afraid to be found wanting. They hang back not because they don’t like warmth and playfulness, but because they don’t want to be branded foolish or undignified or weak. And when I offer myself without nervousness, without dread of rejection, without standing there like a mirror that calls attention to the fears in all of us, it puts them at ease and they respond.
I’ve heard time and again that singing is one of the most vulnerable activities one can do, and, for me at least, that is true. So is being one’s self. And though this journey to my true voice was very long and painful, I don’t regret the time it took or all the misgivings.
pinterest.com, pinned by Anne Krüger
I am instead just so happy to take a deep breath and know that I’ve found it.
My father announced this at the dinner table one day, after one discussion led to another, and ultimately to Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene. My father, Stanley, was a man of few words, except when he was telling a story. When he was telling a story, he was always animated and dramatic. Enthralling, really. But when it came to matters of personal relations, he spoke in short sentences. Sentences that weren’t always direct, but were simple and gruff, and contained all of his otherwise unexpressed heart. “I was the tortoise,” was all we’d get, but it was enough. Everything I had observed growing up told me that Aunt Betty, Uncle Gene and their offspring were hares, and we were tortoises.
Aunt Betty had been a beauty in her youth, and was pampered and adorned just enough to fetch a prize husband, which she did. Uncle Gene had piercing good looks and an animal air, and was a college graduate poised to “climb the ladder.” When I became consistently conscious of him, he had already become an extremely successful executive, a “six figure man” in the late nineteen sixties, of what company or in what business my little six or seven year old self never understood, but all the rewards of which were easy enough for me to grasp. Aunt Betty wore furs, large gemstones and outfits no one else wore, except in glamour magazines or on television. Uncle Gene wore polo shirts, checked blazers, and pinkie rings. He had the trapped energy of someone with some place more important to be. He spoke even less than my father, and, when he did, with far more menace. His yellow eyes, black hair, which was all over his arms, at the opening of his collar, even in his ears, and his rumbling voice, used so rarely and always in short bursts, made him seem always ready to pounce, like some kind of hairy, full-bodied raptor. I had as little to do with him as possible, and he seemed glad of it.
My father, though moody and sometimes brusque, was, I was later to understand, the softest member in his family growing up. This, and his lackluster energy to make something remarkable of himself were the two strikes against him. Since he “wasn’t college material,” the next best thing was a job with a handsome uniform, authority and a pension. He became a cop. And as he was an extremely good looking and a jaunty, Bogart-esque fellow, that handsome uniform served him well when he approached a pretty, caring, demure and capable woman, my mother, who, to her discredit, was the daughter of immigrants. My father’s mother, Gussie, or “Gus” for short, was herself an immigrant, but it didn’t count somehow because she was born on the boat coming over. She had not a lick of an Eastern European accent and fancied herself a woman of the times. And while her first husband (an immigrant) killed himself during the Depression and left her a struggling widow with two young kids to feed, within 2 years time she was remarried to a successful dentist, living in a splendid Grand Concourse apartment, with sunken living room, dining room, eat in kitchen, and two large bedrooms. Her second husband Seymour was born in this country, the son of furriers. Gus and Seymour lived a very comfortable life, a steep rise from the small Harlem tenement where Gus lived with her two children, and Betty and Gene surpassed them. So when my father brought home the soft spoken and unassuming daughter of an immigrant seamstress, Gus looked her up and down, told her that she would be joining a family of a certain caliber and said “I hope you can live up to it.”
Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene invited us to attend a couple of the swank parties they threw at the Spindle Top, a private club and restaurant at the top of a New York City building. My sisters and I were always dressed in our best clothes, and warned to behave like little ladies. What this meant for me was that for the 3 hours or so that we were there I said hardly a word, and just stayed to the outer edges of the scene taking it in with big eyes. I remember, once, Uncle Gene, loosened by whiskey and the satisfaction of success, gave some kind of short toast with wide sweeping gestures, and Aunt Betty floated from guest to guest wearing a white turban that matched her striking white dress. I don’t know if she ever spoke to my sisters, who were older and suitable playmates for my cousins, but she never said a word to me in those years. We would visit them at their homes in Morris Plains, New Jersey and Natick, Massachusetts, often greeted by the barking and highly temperamental “Thor,” a snarling German Short-haired Pointer, usually on a chain just short enough to keep him from actually reaching us but long enough to make it frightfully questionable every time, and then ushered into custom homes with chic décor and noticeable amounts of purple and navy blue. By contrast, we lived in a development where all the homes were virtually identical. Our downstairs floors were pressed linoleum, and something that wasn’t quite wood paneled our family room walls. And yet, we all felt like it was a palace. Our wonderful claim to membership in a thriving suburban town and a huge change from the compact Bronx apartment where we had lived before. It was a home of our own, warm and familiar, just large enough for my sisters and I each to have our own bedrooms, and to find, inside and out, places of absolute solitude to dream.
Though my parents never said as much, I understood that we were the humble cousins in the story. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle saw my mother and father’s quiet nodding and expressions of interest as proper humility, but I saw them for what they were: acts of graciousness. For I was pretty sure that Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene weren’t very nice. They’d peer at me as though I was something to be tolerated, as though the entire visit was something to be tolerated, and, somehow, I felt that my parents knew it, knew that Betty and Gene weren’t very nice and believed they were better than Betty’s uncultured and underachieving brother and his quaint but suitable wife. But my parents pretended otherwise. Everyone was pretending. Aunt Betty and Uncle Gene pretended that that were happy to be there, and my parents pretended they were happy to host them. I watched my parents, who had no use for luxury, who would have just like to have had more breathing space financially, and perhaps a safer and less soul depleting job for my father, attend to any and all of Betty’s commentary, opinions and narratives about good connections, good taste, sophisticated circles and exotic cruises with patience, and kind, if feigned interest. I listened as my mother punctuated Betty’s narrative with the required utterances.
One day, we learned the bad news that Uncle Gene had lost his job in the economic recession. As a man in his 50’s so high on the ladder, we were told, he was having difficulty finding anything remotely like his previous position. It seemed inconceivable to me that anyone would have had the nerve to turn Uncle Gene down; he was that scary. My sisters and I listened solemnly to our mother’s updates: Aunt Betty had to sell this and that piece of jewelry, and Uncle Gene had to take a job beneath him, selling cheap merchandise from China. On a couple of occasions, Aunt Betty came to our house, bringing with her Benetton sweaters, French perfumes and other items, and I watched as she lay things out for my mother’s inspection, explaining the quality and assuring her that $25 for this or that was a bargain. I was older then, and sat in on the proceedings as an additional prospective buyer, gauging my mother’s assessment of whether something was worth buying or would actually be useful, even though we had little cash to spare, and taking my cues from her. And so, after stealing a glance at my mom, and seeing the, “Yes, that would be all right” face, I’d say, “I’d like that, Mom.” And the deal would be struck.
In the many, many years that followed, my father would occasionally give his sister money outright, as any loving and decent sibling would do. Even if he had been disinclined, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t, my grandmother made sure to remind him, “That’s what a brother does!” A man who at his retirement age never cleared 30,000 dollars salary, and who never received one generous gesture from his sister when she and her husband were living large, gave his sister money to get by, and they never spoke of it. Nor did any of us, for my mother explained the humiliation for my aunt and uncle, to be the poor, dependent relations – a humiliation that did nothing to soften them up or make them take much interest in us. Betty referred to me as Little Lisa, and I was pretty sure she had forgotten my actual, name, Elisa, if she ever knew it. Gene never addressed me, except once at the lunch following my grandfather’s funeral when he saw me watching him put his napkin on his coffee saucer and explained to me that it was a technique to absorb any possible spillage and thereby prevent any drips of coffee on his shirt. No, wait, there was also the time when I was five and he drove my mother and me to a local clinic after I split my chin open falling on the hard cement in their basement during a visit. As the doctor stuck me with the anesthetizing needle and I screamed and wailed, Gene burst out with “Oh come on! Act like a big girl!” (I remember thinking in response, “I’m five.”) Aunt Betty’s comments to me were limited to those absolutely required by circumstance. We ran into trouble when a specific utterance wasn’t indicated, and where, for others, some ease or warmth would have normally filled the space. On one occasion where we found ourselves together at the sinks in the ladies’ room of a restaurant, she said, “You shouldn’t wear your hair long like that. Your face is too big for it.” Then she dried her hands and left.
Our relationships with Betty and Gene’s offspring were also less than ideal. In the early years, Janice and Glenn seemed to enjoy my older sisters, with whom they could play games and have adventures roaming the neighborhood. I was too young to be of interest, and, worse, I was ridiculed and excluded by Janice and Glenn wherever possible- a quiet, sensitive mouse of a little girl who was a tag-along, detracted from their cool and needed looking after. My sisters, each a bit younger than Janice and Glen, respectively, were relieved to be considered worthy and I envied them, wanting to be worthy as well. As the years went by, however, whatever connection there was between the four older cousins waned, and once Gene lost his job the full family visits ceased altogether. Betty came by herself, when she did come, and we were never invited to their home again. My mother explained this was because Betty would not be able to afford to host us in the way she would have liked.
Still, the past had its hold on me. I wanted so badly to have an aunt who actually cared about me, and with whom I could find some common ground. In my mid-twenties, I called her up and asked if I could drive out to visit with her. She accepted, and out to New Jersey I went. For hours we chatted, drank coffee and even shared her cigarettes, something I did in a desperate attempt to connect with her, and which was particularly bizarre seeing as how she had recently been diagnosed with emphysema. I put on my best impression of a hard-boiled person, making small talk peppered with cynical observations. It must have worked because she actually expressed some surprise that I turned out to be so interesting, and she insisted I stay for dinner. The elation I felt at her acknowledgment was short-lived, and in retrospect stung as pathetic. I had achieved a false stamp of acceptance, without my aunt having any idea of who I actually was. I never saw her again. She did not want to be seen at my wedding with a portable oxygen tank and died not long after.
Misfortune in that family continued. My cousin Glen had once been a handsome little devil, who knew how to charm my grandma, and get away with everything, until Gene sent him off to a military school to teach him discipline. It was a failed experiment. Glen had the misfortune of being a soft-hearted boy trying to disguise himself as a hard-ass to survive in his own family, and military school only worsened his hell. He did manage to marry someone he loved deeply, and work as an electrician for many years. My parents, with the happy hope that Glen at least would be close with us, even hired him whenever they needed an electrician. But Glen carried his own demons. He smoked like a furnace and put impulse purchases and drugs before his lovely wife and children. His wife left him, and he left us, after my father had to turn down his request for money. My father turned Glen down, not because he refused to support Glen, but because he had already exhausted his small savings helping Glen out once before. And so we lost Glen, who after that had nothing further to do with us, whether through indignation or shame, and who died alone from emphysema and lung cancer a few years later.”
Betty was gone, Glen was gone, Janice was gone, to California to start a new life, and Gene was living with a woman whom we’d never meet and only vaguely knew of. My grandmother had died shortly after Betty’s death, which was such a heavy blow to her, and was not alive to see Glenn follow too soon. We had no contact with Gene after that, and learned of his passing after the fact, each of us filled with a wordless sorrow.
So, when my dad declared, “I was the tortoise” and then glanced around the table to see if we got it, we quietly nodded. He had reached the finish line, without fanfare, and, yes, with a small measure of satisfaction but, more importantly, with good will and a soft heart. We had all won, really. We were all tortoises. We had family, love, hard work, steady, modest achievement, and gratitude. Everything that could be good about people I learned from my watching my parents make that slow and ultimately far-reaching journey together. But, now, some 25 or so years later, I think that maybe my father wasn’t talking about a race against his sister’s family or even about a race at all. Maybe he was finally free to reject out loud the voices in his head telling him that anyone who wasn’t a go-getter, anyone who delighted in simple things, who wasted time daydreaming about fantastic adventures he didn’t actually want for himself, who didn’t “climb the ladder” and who was content to end each day at home with his family and his books, was a bit of a stooge. Maybe he was trying to tell us that it’s not even about whether fast and flashy are better. It’s about where you’re heading that matters.
There have been a few things about raising my children I have been a genius at, though, to be honest, these were more of the my-god-they-are-such-gullible-newbies variety and not so much of the I-must-get-them-to-understand-this variety. My most genius invention was the surprise plate. Even more so than the secret cameras I convinced them I had set up at their elementary and middle schools (achieving this through minutely detailed and accurate reportage of tiny incidents that happened in school which I had either witnessed unbeknownst to them or had related to me by other parents who were there). The surprise plate was sheer beauty: so simple but so incredibly effective.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if millions of other mothers out there have all come upon the surprise plate as well, because mothers are indeed a clever bunch, but it sure felt like my own genius magic, whipping it up one day almost out of thin air, and getting instant results. It happened on a day when the kids were not hungry enough to start whining about the exact meal they would require, down to each ridiculously innutritious item (with extra frosting!), if they were to be expected to mellow out and not escalate to a tantrum, but still were invested enough to inquire with some interest as to what I intended to present as “lunch.” I hesitated in my response, having been thrown by the fact that it was nowhere near close to lunch, and the kids, thinking they were sniffing disaster, instantly became alarmed. Didn’t my hesitation mean I was planning a bad, awful, disgusting lunch? But like a highly tuned instrument of bio-feedback making a thousand tiny adjustments every moment to prevent the otherwise oncoming meltdown, my scrambling brain made a sudden leap. I turned serenely toward them with wide grin, and, sweeping my arm out in a servile and unctuous arc, I told them, “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m making you surprise plates.”
“What’s on a surprise plate?” they nervously asked. And with the suavity of a practiced TV host, and the beatific smile and manner of a magical fairy, I answered, “Well, it’s a surprise!”
by Samantha Lee, found at http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2015/10/14/13-pieces-of-disney-food-art-cute-enough-to-eat/
And they nodded in this information, with a half-understanding, a bit of game curiosity and a good dose of skepticism. I felt that I had averted a storm, at least for the time being. As the time for lunch drew near, I had to figure out what would go on those damn plates. “Okay, there’s the Goldfish, and those grapes I had this morning didn’t have that bad aftertaste from the skin… but what else? What ELSE? And I rifled through the fridge till I found some bologna to roll up and some cooked broccoli left overs, and scouted the pantry till I lighted upon the canned sliced peaches. Sweet, but still marginally nutritious. And to seal the deal, Hostess yodels!
At lunch, I served them with great pomp and circumstance. “Here are your surprise plates!” The fun they had pointing out the various items, their relief in not be served something truly repugnant and, moreover, their delight also in getting not just canned peaches, but a yodel besides, rendered the bologna completely benign. And the broccoli! The broccoli was transformed! It was now merely a mildly confusing disappointment, no longer something to cause eruptions of yowls and hideous, grimacing expressions. “But Mom, there’s broccoli.”
I shrugged with raised upturned hands and philosophically said, “Well, it’s a surprise plate. You never know what you’re gonna get.” This, to my well hidden amazement, led to them affirming with a mix of glee and resignation, “You never know what you’re gonna get!” They ate the broccoli.
The next day, they pleaded in chorus for surprise plates. “Oh no,” I said, “that’s an only once in a while thing,” and I insisted on serving them an “ordinary” lunch of chicken nuggets, banana slices, some green beans and two oreos. After a few times of them asking when they’d get surprise plates again, I finally, and “begrudgingly” said, “Okay, okay! I’ll make surprise plates.” This time it was hardboiled eggs, a one-serving of Mott’s applesauce, some M & M’s, carrot sticks with a little puddle of ranch dressing and cooked zucchini. “Yay, M & M’s! Eww, zucchini!” but they ate it all. That was it! I felt like Dr. Frankenstein must have when he gave life to his monster. “I HAVE DONE IT!”
Those once in a while surprise plates helped me get all kinds of vegetables into my kids’ mouths, and the good-natured-oh-well ingestion of these veggies often led to their eventual acceptance onto both “ordinary” lunch and dinner plates. (Though I wasn’t fool enough try the really challenging ones, like collard greens or kale. Why risk spoiling a good thing?)
I kept up those surprise plates until the day finally came, sadly, when it occurred to one of them to say, “I’m not eating that, Ma.” And just like that, the magic of the surprise plate was gone. Oh well. It was good while it lasted. And thinking about it now, I recall that the idea wasn’t really mine, but actually was my mother’s. She had once told me about the surprise plates she had made for my nieces when they stayed with her, and the notion must have lodged in my brain, waiting for the perfect time to come out. Did she know about the power of the plate to induce the eating of vegetables? She must have. She was a mother, after all.
found at biblemoneymatters.com/how-to-create-a-decorated-handprint-plate/
The Harvard Business Review featured this article by Diane Musho Hamilton, about how to practice remaining calm during an emotional conflict, perhaps to help its readers regain reason and control in heated business arguments. But of course arguments that escalate to that place where we become seething cauldrons occur in personal relations all the time too, if not more so. Hamilton offers a method for keeping our higher intelligence available to restore order when our more primitive emotion centers hijack our communications.
“We’ll always keep in touch, no matter what happens.”
From buzz feed.com; 16 Pictures of Animals Holding Hands, February 14, 2012
“I’ll never betray you, no matter what happens.”
“I’ll always love you, no matter what happens.”
These are things we all say in a moment of raw, intense feeling. We really mean the first part; boy do we mean it! It floods us and makes our lungs expand and maybe even our nostrils flare and there is no doubt how sincere we are about that feeling. It is a beautiful, naked pledge about our intent at that moment, offered when we are so overcome with emotion that we willingly expose ourselves.
But that second part, “no matter what happens,”… isn’t it a bit of an escape clause? A ceding of responsibility? We expose ourselves, yes, but aren’t we clinging to just that little bit of a fig leaf? No, no, we say! We are just paying homage to the unpredictability of life in the architecture of our pledge, because let’s face it, life happens to us. If anything, that underscores our pledge, right? Makes it all the more sincere, because we will prevail no matter what unexpected things happen to us! And anyway, it’s true!, Things do “happen” to us! Don’t they?
There are undoubtedly times when circumstances are radically thrust upon us, not by choice. An example, of course, is death. Another is powerlessness, say, in the case of a young child, who does not have the means or know-how to overcome obstacles placed in her way by parents’ actions or choices. How about some sort of apocalypse? A contagion decimates our population, all technology breaks down and transportation and communication become virtually impossible. That would definitely be something that happens to us. What about a devastating illness to us or a loved one? What about being fired from your job (assuming it is not because you are an unbearable jerk or lazy ass)? What about an asteroid hitting the earth? Yes, there are indeed many ways in which life “happens.” And to be fair, far less dramatic but no less powerful turns of events also can “happen” to us. People who are dear to us suddenly have needs that conflict with ours or each other. Or our finances change, and that requires radical adjustments. The list is endless.
But what about choice? Our lives are not just left to free-floating chaos, are they? Every day, no matter what “happens,” we make choices that affect how we handle or navigate what has “happened.” Moreover, in many if not most cases, the very thing that “happened” happened precisely because of a choice, or a cumulation of choices. We made it happen. Or we let it.
From Peanuts, by Charles Schultz
We make choices every day that direct our journeys on this little speck of rock. Thousands and thousands of choices. Little ones, big ones, easy ones, and excruciatingly hard ones. That last kind, many people avoid making, and they passively ride time for as long as they can without actually making a choice, until the choice is made for them. By waiting, we think we have absolved ourselves of the responsibility of choosing. But the truth is that’s a choice as well, and in most cases anyway we kind of know, deep down in our guts, which way things are more likely to go as a result of our not making the choice.
So, when friendships falter, it’s due to people deciding something. Perhaps it’s due to them deciding, in the midst of feeling overwhelmed by other things, that making the time for that phone call to that particular friend is a low priority. Whereas, calling some other friend to talk remains a high priority. Maybe it’s because that low priority friend has been making us feel bad more and more often, criticizing us or judging us. Maybe that low priority friend doesn’t seem as necessary to our well being as they used to. Regardless of the reason, it’s a choice. To give up reading fiction, because the demands of your job come first no matter how unreasonable or soul-destroying they have become; that’s a choice. To ignore exhortations from your spouse or your mother to stand up straight so you won’t fold in on yourself as you age; that’s a choice. And when it turns out, therefore, that you are indeed stooped over in your middle age, well, that was your choice, not really just genetics “happening” to you. To live with unhappiness because it is too difficult to rectify it, or because you believe making changes will shatter the happiness or stability of someone else; those are choices.
In many cases, the choices we make are the right ones for us. You could even say they are always the right ones, because they reflect what we really want or feel capable of at the time. But even when right for us, they come at a price, and so it’s easier to pretend we aren’t making them. Maybe they come with someone’s hurt feelings, or maybe with our own disappointment in having to let go of something that we did want, but not as much as the other thing we chose.
I just wish people admitted their choices as choices. I think it would empower them. That certainly has been the case for me. Realizing I had made choices and that not everything had just “happened,” led me to take a long hard look at why I had made those choices. I understood more about myself, and facing new, difficult choices became easier.
So I won’t use that formulation, “no matter what happens,” to drive home the truth of my pledges. Instead of saying “I will always [fill in the blank] no matter what happens” I will say “I feel with all my heart that I will always choose us.” Us as friends, lovers, colleagues, teammates, partners in crime, whatever. Unless, of course, I know I wouldn’t really make that choice. Unless, there is something or someone I know I would choose instead when really pressed about it.
Found at thetraveltester.com
Chances are our lives will never go exactly the way we want them to, because, well, things do happen. But the truth is, they’re going pretty damned close to where we want them to, because we make the choices everyday that lead us there.
These days, I reserve the word grateful for those things that bring a stab of pain to my heart as it overfills. If you find a pop tart left behind in your pantry by your ravenous kids you might feel a small rush of glee contemplating how you get to eat it, but that is not gratitude. If, however, you find that pop tart hidden behind some rubble in your post-apocalyptic home, where you have been starving for a week, you might instead experience that overwhelming tidal wave of joy, relief, thankfulness and humility that is gratitude.
photo by Gregory Mancuso; see gregorymancuso.com
I have many things in my life that blow me down with gratitude when I think about them. At 54, seeing all the disease and infirmities around me, I am practically in tears contemplating how I have thus far remained healthy and strong. And just a week ago, I was hanging out with both my kids, during their college winter breaks, when it dawned on me that they are my greatest accomplishment. I’ll happily share the glory for that accomplishment with their father, for there is more than enough to go around. It hit me, watching them riff jokes off something on the television, displaying their quick humor, their intelligence and warmth, their affection for each other and various other aspects of their personalities, that I really didn’t need to accomplish another single thing in my life in order to feel that my time on Earth served its purpose. For how could I achieve anything greater than creating these two extraordinarily wonderful people? Watching them there, I felt the gratitude coming along full bore, building and building, until it crashed over me, leaving me blubbering like a baby. They will tell you. I really was blubbering.
section from photo by Anton Jankovoy; see jankovoy.com
Standing here in the temporary desert of my own personal post-apocalyptic world, another thing that flattens me low with gratitude is the fact that I have loved with abandon, not once, but four times. Four times! That’s crazy! But true. This isn’t me mistaking for the real thing the times that I was merely infatuated or just out for sex or trying so hard to love someone I just couldn’t. I actually loved with abandon four times. I spoke uninhibited words to my lovers, purely, without agenda. I cared deeply how their family histories, their fears and triumphs, and their dreams shaped who they were. I wanted them to soar, and be everything they wanted to be. I looked right into their eyes and revealed myself. So, it matters not if I end up alone in my old age. I have seen the mountaintop. And in at least two of the cases, I actually stood on the mountaintop; I was loved with abandon in return. And the wave that tumbles me when I think about that is still a rush and a humbling.
Something happens to us adults as we maneuver the scary social complexities of society. We grow ever more hard-boiled, ever more guarded, every more cynical and ever more bitter. We forget all that we have to be dizzyingly grateful for. And we forget how to love with abandon. We sneer at it as folly. A recipe for disaster. And risking that much exposure and surrender often leads to terrible heartache, it’s true. It came to that for me in all four cases. So we hover nervously when we see our children take those risks, talking them out of it and predicting doom in our desire to protect them. But oh! That sublime feeling, when you surpass your boundaries, and lay yourself bare, there is nothing more thrilling, more alive, more beautiful. How could we not want that for our children? How is it that we focus on the downfall instead of the loft? I tell my daughter I am so, so happy for her that she has achieved love with abandon. For she has something for which she can be forever grateful, something she will always keep, no matter what happens. And you do. You keep it always.
photo by Andrea McChesney; found at iheartfaces.com
